The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
With the explosive growth of critical data and operational systems, and the steady miniaturization of electronics, comes an increase in random errors and failures. While transistor count per chip is increasing, the reliability of transistors is, in many cases, declining. Integrated circuit technology with nano-scale features and power and energy constraints for the mobile device market are, at least in part, to blame. Near-threshold voltage operation within non-volatile memories trade off long-term reliability for reduced power. Storage technologies are also evolving at a rapid pace, but come with compromises such as limited write endurance and observable write errors. Important critical applications are being designed to run on mobile devices. These developments can introduce increased vulnerability and incidence of errors in operational systems. Likewise, applications that were not previously considered critical in nature may now run on commodity hardware and operate in environments that observe undesirable error or failure modes. Industries designing airliners, space vehicles, autonomous automobiles, and applications utilizing mobile technology require improved resiliency designs. Many systems of very large scale are also at risk.
Critical applications such as airliners, autonomous vehicles, space stations, power plants, and healthcare systems all depend on vast amounts of accurate data in order to function correctly. For example, airliners operate in problematic environments having fluctuating temperature and humidity, high shock and vibration, abnormal degradation of logic and memory circuits, electrical storms, radiation from space including naturally occurring ionizing particles or electromagnetic pulse, and the possibilities of fire, collision, and sabotage. Data centers, power plants, hospitals, financial offices, and the like can also experience earthquakes, storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, and other disasters. A reliable source of electrical power is an issue that affects critical systems in many ways.
A recent study by a leading airliner manufacturer found that between 2006 and 2015, 15 of 65 crashes were Loss of Control in Flight (LOC-I) and resulted in 1,396 deaths. Boeing, “Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents, 2015, available at http://www.boeing. com/resources/boeingdotcom/comp any/about_bca/pdf/statsum.pdf. Contemporary findings list LOC-I as being the highest cause of airliner fatalities, and missing or invalid data may be a significant cause. See Aviation Performance Solutions, “What is Loss of Control In-Flight (LOC-I),” http://apstraining.com/loss-of-control-in-flight-loc-i/. As the control systems evolve to handle takeoffs and landings, the experience level of pilots decreases. Today's more aggressive landing patterns designed to save time in the air put even more emphasis on the functionality and reliability of the autonomous controls. Complicating matters is a creeping demand to support more internet, mobile, and satellite access for passengers and crew. This presents additional security, data protection, and system issues and could require a separate parallel data and control system of similar architecture and methods.
In the healthcare industry, mobile devices such as tablets and phones have the connectivity and processing power to provide a mobile medical office via applications becoming available. Unfortunately, these mobile devices are often even more subject to errors than other electronics.
Thus, there is a need in the art for systems and methods for data processing. Particularly, there is a need in the art for critical system architecture and data protection for use in airliner systems, automobile systems, aerospace systems, healthcare systems, and other critical or large-scale systems.